


Dearest Hazel (The Impossible Letter)

by messofthejess



Category: Paper Towns - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Genre: Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Crossover, Epistolary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 06:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5036536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messofthejess/pseuds/messofthejess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Quentin stopped at the same BP station he was at on his lovestruck journey to Agloe when he came back to Orlando? And what if the cashier at that BP station thought Quentin looked like an old friend? And what if that cashier wrote back to his girlfriend from another life to tell her Quentin's story?</p><p>This story is the answer to those questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dearest Hazel (The Impossible Letter)

July 24, 2015

Dearest Hazel,

I am unsure if you are able to receive my letters from here. I’d like to think that we are, in some way, still connected, and that through some beautiful, mysterious fashion we can communicate with one another. That’s probably the foolish hope of a dead young man. But I’ve never pretended to be practical. 

I love you. I want you to move on with your life, to break and mend your heart on friendship and romance a thousand times over. I’m not selfish enough to want you to keep yourself hung up on me. You would do that, too—bind yourself up in chastity like a nun to her osteosarcomatic martyr. I promise you, though, there are many, many more eligible young, solidly built young men out there who would gladly appreciate an early-2000s Natalie Portman look-alike. And I’d even be willing to bet some of them have—wait for it—two legs! Two whole, toned, flesh-and-bone legs. Very sexy, I know. I always had a feeling you’re a legs sort of woman, Hazel Grace. 

But I digress, as I often do. It’s too easy to ramble after you’re dead. Time just stretches on and on, so you think you have forever to talk. And it turns out you do have forever to talk. Just that very few people are willing to listen to you.

Shit, I did it again. 

I love you.

(I know I already said that, but even after dying, I find I can’t say it enough.)

I love you.

Did you know I can come back to the world? Not back to my own body, unfortunately. There are serious consequences involved with raising the dead, one of them being that friends and family, you know, freak the hell out when their loved ones come lurching out of nowhere. Any other way is fine, though. I’d forgotten what it was like to be alive the first time I did, so I disguised myself in the best way possible to hide my confusion in re living.

I became a gas station cashier.

Now, the great nation we call the United States of America likes to defecate upon those whose grand occupation is in the service industry. I, however, think being a gas station cashier is a job rife with metaphorical resonance. (You haven’t missed my pretentious blathering on how everything is a metaphor, have you?) I see people from all walks of life in my store: young, old, sun-wrinkled, well-moisturized, smokers and drinkers and scratch-off fiends. And of course the stray traveler who just wants a Pepsi and Doritos before beating back onto the I-95.

Incidentally, I am not in a gas station in Indianapolis. As you might have guessed from the highway name, I’m currently bouncing around in the great state of Georgia. The BP station is about an hour and some change away from Jacksonville, Florida, and just a bit east of a teeny little community called White Oak. It’s not too far in from the ocean, actually. I think you’d like the ocean, Hazel. Swimming may be a slight impossibility with your cannula, but the salty air has a nice tang to it, and the sand is softer than those sheets in the Hotel de Filosoof (please tell me you remember how soft those sheets were). Anyway, I don’t get a huge rush of customers every day, so it’s usually quiet. But I had to tell you about this one group of customers I had a couple months ago, and one young man in particular.

They burst into the store rather abruptly, so I had to spit out an unlit Marlboro Light I’d had in my mouth (see, I can’t even kick that habit in the afterlife). One girl, Lacey, seemed to be in charge of the group, and darted right for the drinks cooler. I’ve never seen someone carry so many energy drinks in a shirt-hammock in any of my lives. A boy who looked vaguely like a Chihuahua on speed bolted for the men’s bathroom; I heard him let out an impressively loud and orgasmic groan when he finally got to pee. The other girl, who Lacey called Angela, rifled through the chips section. And out at the pump, next to a Chrysler minivan that screamed suburbia, stood another boy pumping gas and ruffling his afro. 

Then I heard the word “CRACKERS!” bellowed from the salty snacks aisle. Now, I enjoyed some crackers in my short life with you, Hazel Grace (my favorite kind is Goldfish, incidentally). But this was the sound of someone who probably would have licked the bathroom floor for a measly saltine (the bathroom floor here is actually quite clean). If this didn’t sound weird before, it’s about to get weirder.

The “CRACKERS!” guy looked 100% like Isaac, a dead ringer. 

I had to blink a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t him. His hair didn’t have the same swoopy look to it, and there was the fact that he could see with both eyes. No dark glasses or cane. But I had half a mind to pick up the phone and call Isaac to make sure either a) he wasn’t in Georgia at the moment, or b) he didn’t have a stunningly attractive identical cousin who was in Florida. Then I remembered he probably wouldn’t have recognized the voice (new body, new voice) and would have wondered why the hell a stranger had called to harass a blind and sexually frustrated young man in Indianapolis. So I had to keep my amazement to myself. Do you know how hard this was for me, Hazel? Haven’t been able to tell anyone about this until now.

Anyway, Not-Isaac and his associates proceeded to dump practically half the store on my counter. Chips, Bluefin, granola bars, T-shirts, sunglasses, and, yes, crackers galore. Chihuahua Boy finally shot out of the bathroom and slammed a two-liter of Coke on the counter, too. Lacey gave him a withering yet loving look and drew a BP card out of her clutch.

“Are any of you Julius M. Pemberton?” I asked, reading the name on the card. 

“That’s my dad. I’m Lacey,” Lacey piped up (that’s how I learned her name). 

“Does he know you’re using this card?” 

“Listen, man,” Chihuahua Boy slapped his hands on the counter. “We’re on a mission to find our friend—a mission that needs to be completed in…”

“Twenty-one hours,” Angela finished.

“Twenty-one hours!” Chihuahua Boy repeated. “So it’s like, crazy important that you ring up all our stuff like super quick fast. Otherwise she’s gonna be gone.”

“Don’t be rude, Ben,” Lacey chastised. “He has a name! And it’s…” she trailed off, looking at my chest where my nametag should have been pinned (although maybe she was gazing at my rippling pectorals, like you so often did).

“Ansel,” I said. I didn’t have a nametag, largely because I hadn’t picked out a name for this body yet. Ansel sounded nice, though. Quaint and Norwegian-y. I picked up the first bag of chips from their mountain of items and started a scan-and-bag frenzy.

It’s worth noting that Not-Isaac didn’t say an entire word while he was with his friends. I assume they were all friends—otherwise they were a vivacious group of mutual kidnappers. Anyway, he kept intensely staring at the floor. Clearly, he wasn’t here; mentally, he was in another place entirely. It struck me then that perhaps Ben hadn’t been exaggerating. Maybe they were on a serious mission to find someone. Not-Isaac seemed hell-bent on finding whoever was at the end of their journey, more so than anyone else in the group. While everyone else was darting out the door with stuffed plastic bags, he stood there, entranced by the ending.

“Hey,” I said, shaking the last plastic bag (30 cans of Bluefin, can you imagine?) at him. Not-Isaac finally snapped back into reality and looked up. His face was sheepish when he took the bag from me.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I guess I was somewhere else.”

“Well, I hope you find who you’re looking for in that somewhere else,” I replied.

Not-Isaac didn’t say anything more. He just hefted the bag off the counter and headed for the door. But I could see a smile sketched on his face.

I never expected to see Not-Isaac again. And I definitely didn’t expect to see him again within 48 hours of our first meeting. But there he was, wandering by the drink coolers when I came back from putting the mop and bucket away. He was wearing the same shirt he had on the last time—thankfully he wasn’t the person who got the unfortunate Confederate flag T-shirt I’d had to bag up. I wonder who did end up wearing it.

“Hey. Didn’t expect to see you back here,” I called. 

He jerked his head noncommittally, rubbing his hands up and down his crossed arms. His stare was different this time: to a stranger, he looked absolutely fascinated by the selection of aspartame-loaded drinks perched on the cooler shelves. But because he looked so very much like Isaac, I had a feeling I knew his mannerisms. This was an “I have lost everything and am looking for a place to hide but all I could find was a BP station in southeastern Georgia” kind of stare. 

No one else was in the store, so I let the counter be for a while and walked up to him. Maybe this was a creepy move. If Not-Isaac was creeped out, he didn’t show it. Really, the nutrition facts on Diet Pepsi aren’t that riveting that they merit an in-depth analysis.

“I didn’t catch your name when you were here with your friends. What is it?”

“Quentin.” Oh, how I despise one-word answers, Hazel Grace. Maybe you never caught onto that. But one-word answers (almost) unequivocally mean something is wrong with the respondent.

“Where are your friends, by the way?”

Now that got him to turn his head. And oh, how his eyes drooped with dejection. Forgive my insensitivity, but Isaac could never really accomplish such a despondent look with only one eye. Quentin, on the other hand, could make you think nothing but an abyss was hidden under his dark lashes.

“They left me behind. I got here on a bus.”

“Seems like a shitty thing for friends to do.”

“No, no. I wanted to get left behind.” He raked his hands through his hair—brown, free-spirited curls you could lose yourself in without trying. “I-I had someone I needed to see. And they didn’t need to see her, so they took off.”

“Surely they could have waited,” I said, leaning against the cooler doors.

“They could’ve. But I wasn’t so sure I wanted to come back, that’s the thing.”

The more Quentin talked, the less sense he made. I glanced out the door to the parking lot to check for customers. Not a rusty Jeep or sand-dusted convertible in sight. I could spare some time with him, see what his story really was.

So that’s how I started a conversation with Quentin Jacobsen of Orlando, Florida over some gas-station hot dogs and 7-Up. This was an epic conversation, one of unrequited love and mystery and music and getting lost and found. As it turns out, I’d caught Q (that’s what he wanted to be called) and his friends on a truly madcap expedition to this paper town called Agloe, New York. I didn’t believe it existed, so I pulled out one of the laminated Rand McNally maps that only the truly wayward tourist buys. Then Q explained Agloe was unique to Esso maps as a copyright trap for cartographers. Fascinating! But then so many people started visiting the spot that Agloe became real, then unreal, and real again with Margo Roth Spiegelman. 

If you could have heard Q talk about Margo, Hazel, I’m sure you would have had plenty to say to him about making people out to be more than they are. He spoke of her at first like she was a goddess, with deep reverence. Her rap sheet of awesome exploits and pranks would fill another letter. Yet the young woman behind all those legendary stories was just that: a young woman. And she was miserable, to hear Q tell it. 

“She always seemed untouchable, you know?” he said with a swig of 7-Up. “Like she would descend from on high to deliver an edict, and everyone at school would just snap to it because she’s Margo. Our social scene kinda ground to a halt without her.”

I nodded. Since I had to drop out of high school thanks to osteosarcoma, I thankfully never got too involved with the popularity gag. But I could sympathize a little. 

“I had no idea she felt so empty, though. That’s what she explained to me in Agloe: she felt like a paper girl in a paper town, with no prospects other than to march down the same road in life as everyone else. College, career, marriage, house, family, retirement, death. That’s how she saw things.”

“Sounds awfully simplistic,” I interjected.

“That’s what I thought at first, too,” Q nodded. “Margo just wanted to be different from everyone else, and she was. Is different. But I don’t see that path as some boring trap. It’s…comforting. To know things have been established ahead of you. All you have to do is walk.”

“I wouldn’t call an emergency road trip to a town that might not exist all because the girl next door I’ve been in love with my whole life might have disappeared there walking the established path,” I grinned. “In fact, it sounds pretty unordinary.” 

I swear Q blushed. Didn’t know I had that power over multiple genders. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “I suppose it is pretty unordinary.”

“What did she say to your grandiose gesture of love?”

His face twisted into a mixture of baffled and scared. Probably because I’d asked him such a hard question with a hot dog slithering halfway down his esophagus.

“Uh, nothing.” Q swallowed, a dot of mustard clinging to his upper lip. “I guess she’d known all along I loved her.”

“In my experience, people generally aren’t as subtle as they think.”

“I s’pose not.”

“Still pretty incredible you did that for her, though. I’m jealous.”

“Why?”

Shit. I’d almost let it slip to Q what my…condition was. The rules are very strict. If you decide to inhabit another body, you can’t tell anyone anything that might compromise your existence. One life story per body. Still, I could twist this to my advantage.

“Well…in another life, I was very sick.” HA! Another life, Hazel Grace, get it? Oh, too soon? Damn. “And because I was so sick, I got a wish.”

“Oh, from Make A Wish?”

“Yeah, something like that,” I shrugged. It’s not worth going into why the Genies are clearly so much better. “Anyway, I used my wish to take my girlfriend to the Netherlands so she could meet her favorite author.”

Hazel, have you ever seen someone spit-take with hot dog and 7-Up? You should. It is disgusting in the most fantastic way imaginable. 

“How are you possibly jealous of my road trip for Margo when you did something like that?!”

“Well, for starters, it’s not like I drove to the Netherlands.”

That got Q laughing, and that got me laughing, because he was still somewhat choking (not lethally, don’t worry) on a bit of hot dog, so his laugh sounded like a goose with its neck in a knot. We went on for a while, pausing only to look at each other and start cracking up all over again.

“So how’d your trip go?” Q finally managed to get out. 

“Wonderfully. The author was a colossal douchebag, but the rest of the trip…well, it was the happiest time of my life.” I well and truly mean that, Hazel Grace. I hope you feel the same about it.

“And your girlfriend?”

Ah, here’s where my throat hitched. I hope you can forgive me for this lie. “She died.”

“Oh.”

That monosyllable hung in the air for a bit. A couple beachcombers with sand in their hair came in looking for scratch-off tickets, so I had to help them out. Q stayed at the table, sipping on his 7-Up. Death really tends to nix conversation quickly, as I’m sure you know. 

Finally, I came back to the table. My hot dog looked rather pathetic; I tossed it in the trash. “Where is Margo now?”

“Headed to New York City. Says she’s gonna try to live her life out there.”

A young person moving to New York to test out their individuality? Gosh, I’d never heard that one before! I fought the urge to roll my eyes, Hazel, and I succeeded.

“And you were seriously going to go with her?”

Q met my eyes for the second time that day. The hopelessness was gone and had been replaced by something a bit more buoyant. Not quite happiness, but perhaps cautious optimism. He nodded.

“Why would you do that?”

“What’s there for me in Orlando? The same old drivel as before. Prom and graduation and all the other high school bullshit. Everyone is gonna get all touchy-feely and pretend they loved each other the whole time, and it’s sickening. I want to get the hell out of there, too! You know what Margo told me? The hardest part is right before you leave; after you do it once, though, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

“So you’re going to just pull up stakes and head out into the world with no diploma, no prospects, and no plan?”

“It worked for Margo!”

“YOU’RE NOT MARGO!” I yelled. Thank God no one else was around—I’m pretty sure you could have heard me clear to the far gas pumps. “For God’s sake, Quentin, you just told me a while ago that routine didn’t bother you. It’s comfortable, you said!”

“Yeah, and then you pointed out my pretty unordinary road trip!”

“Really.” I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back in my chair. “You’re really going to base your life choices on the advice you get from a gas station cashier.” 

“You listened to me! You heard what I said about the paper—”

“Forget about the goddamn paper,” I growled. Q really had me pissed off. “Look, I…I know this contradicts what I just said, but listen to me for a minute. You don’t want to take the routine stuff for granted. Because there may come a day in your life where you find you can’t do something so routine anymore.” I paused for breath and continued. “You’ll wake up and maybe you can’t breathe or walk like you used to, so stairs are an issue. You can’t carry on long conversations with your friends, because you get winded. And they stop coming around because they can’t figure out how to deal with this thing that you’ve become.”

Q’s eyes grew wider with each sentence, but I kept going. “You won’t be able to live up to what your parents expect. They’ll cry in the night when they think you’re not listening, but you’re awake because you don’t know if this will be the last time you’re awake. As shitty as you feel, you savor every last labored breath, every last twitch and blink and nod, because that means you’re alive.

“So please, Quentin. Take it from someone who’s crawled to the edge of existence and got pulled back, only to watch someone they love careen over.” (I truly am sorry for the lies I spun, Hazel, but I had to. You’ll understand, I hope.) “Celebrate the ordinary. Take pride in your routine, because you never know when it’s going to be taken away. The Margo Roth Spiegelmans of the world? They don’t learn that lesson until it’s too late. I don’t want it to be too late for you.”

If there has ever been a stronger, deeper silence between two people than what seeped through the walls of that BP station outside White Oak, Georgia, I have never known it. I didn’t even know fluorescent lights buzzed until that day. Q was rendered speechless, as was I. He looked like he was on the verge of crying; he mopped the corners of his eyes on his dirty T-shirt once or twice. A couple people drove up to the pumps for gas. Thankfully, they paid outside. 

“Prom is tomorrow,” Q said after a long while. His voice crackled—he was going to cry.

“Yeah?” I replied. “You gonna make it back to Orlando in time?”

“I’m not sure. I think I already missed my bus for today…”

Well, now I felt like an asshole. Not only did I yell at a complete not-stranger about how to live his life (and I managed to sound like one of my mother’s throw pillows—nice), but I made him possibly miss his prom. “Are your friends out on the road still?”

“I have no clue.”

I walked over to the phone that only ever rings when someone calls in sick or when the manager wants to gossip, picked it up off the charger, and handed it to him. “Only one way to find out.”

Turns out his friends weren’t that far away. They’d stayed overnight at a motel just outside Savannah and were back on the I-95. “They’ll come and get me!” Q whispered with his hand over the speaker so they couldn’t hear. What a doll. “Yeah—Radar and Angela did what?” he said to whomever was on the other end. Chihuahua Boy, if I had to hazard a guess.

Eventually, a Chrysler minivan which had clearly seen its better days wheeled into the parking lot. Lacey waved impatiently from the driver’s seat, and I followed Q outside. The day was hot, but a nice breeze wafted west from the ocean and kept the air moving. 

“Hey, Q,” I said, clapping a hand on his shoulder before he could walk away.

“Yeah?” he said, turning his head to me. His brown curls wriggled in the breeze.

“Just promise me you’ll graduate before you take off on another road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee or wherever.”

He squinted at me, incredulous. “There can’t possibly be a real town called Gutshot.”

“It’s real if you make it so.” 

Q grinned for the first time all day and grabbed my hand, shaking it. “Thanks, man. I really gotta go now, though.” He dashed toward the minivan and jumped through the open sliding back door. It slammed shut, and I could see his friends in the back start to pummel him with questions. I raised my hand in farewell.

The driver’s side window suddenly rolled down. “Hey!” Q yelled. “What’s your name, anyway?!”

“Call me Ansel!” I said.

“ANGEL?” he yelled back. By then, the minivan was kicking up clods of sand and dust and speeding back to the I-95, so he couldn’t have heard me if he wanted. But he still warranted a response.

“Yeah,” I said to myself. “Angel sounds about right, too.”

So that was the story of Quentin Not-Isaac Jacobsen, who came into my store looking for love the first time and looking for purpose the second time. I hope he did make it to his prom—I deeply regret not being able to take you to my own, Hazel. You really would have put Natalie Portman in her Oscars dress to shame. But we did get to drink the stars and kiss in the Anne Frank House and dance in our own way in the Hotel de Filosoof. That’s better than any prom.

I told you this so you’d remember to celebrate the ordinary. I know that’s tricky business, what with worrying about dying as you are wont to do. I haven’t seen you yet on the other side, though, so it means you’re still fighting the good fight (God, I hate that expression, but it’s very apt). I know you think it’s necessary to walk lightly and not hurt those around you, because maybe they’ll miss you less when you’re gone. Well, I hate to say this, but it won’t work. You will still hurt people, but not in a Margo Roth Spiegelman kind of way. It will be a sweet ache. I know, because I feel it every day I am apart from you. Don’t get any ideas about joining me early, though, Hazel. The world still needs you, and you still need the world. Drink the stars, and don’t let your star go out before it’s time.

I love you, Hazel Grace Lancaster. And I always will. 

Yours most faithfully,  
Augustus Waters

**Author's Note:**

> If you've seen the Paper Towns movie, you'll know the BP station cashier was played by Ansel Elgort, the dashing young man who also played Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars. And you'll also know that Nat Wolff plays both Quentin in Paper Towns and Isaac in The Fault in Our Stars. I toyed around with the idea that, hey, maybe Augustus somehow came back from the dead and found work as a gas station cashier in rural Georgia. It all snowballed from there, and the letter you just read was the end result of said snowball.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
